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Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Soccer: Iranian moderates and hardliner lock horns on the pitch

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani suffered in the run-up to
crucial elections in early 2016 what amounted to at least a symbolic defeat when
state-run television banned Iran’s most popular soccer program from running an
interview with his foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, on soccer and
politics.

Amid confusion about the reason for the ban, Iranians
worried that not only was their beloved, already highly politicized sport being
dragged further into the country’s power struggle but also that government-controlled
television was taking sides in a partisan struggle.

Iranian media reported that Islamic Republic of Iran
Broadcasting (IRIB), the country’s broadcast authority, had banned Mr. Zarif’s
appearance because of his liberal views and the fact that his appearance on the
soccer show might brand him as a leader in the mould of nationalist president
Mohammed Mossadegh, who was toppled in 1953 in a US and British-backed coup.

“Iran's soccer diplomacy: ‘anything goes’ in fight for
parliament seats,” said one headline referring to polling in February to elect
both the Islamic republic’s legislature as well as its Assembly of Experts, the
forum that appoints the country’s spiritual leader. The assembly, which is
elected for a period of eight years, could well be the first in 26 years to
appoint a new spiritual and political leader with 76-year old Ayatollah Ali
Hosseini Khamenei believed to be suffering from prostate cancer.

Former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a moderate who
headed the assembly until 2009 said
in a reference to Mr. Khamenei’s health that the council had recently “appointed
a group to list the qualified people that will be put to a vote (in the
assembly) when an incident happens.”

He said Iran was “getting ready for determining its fate for
years to come" with February’s elections for parliament and the assembly. Mr.
Khamenei has rejected attempts in recent months by Rouhani to limit the
assembly’s ability to bar moderates from standing as candidates.

Efforts by hardliners with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards
Corps (IRGC) in the lead to control soccer underline the importance of the
pitch as a battleground in the struggle for Iran’s future in the wake of the
nuclear agreement with Iran and the expected lifting of stringent United
Nations sanctions that Western nations hope will boost Mr. Rouhani in the
elections.

The significance of soccer has been heightened by Iran’s
poor international performance as well as allegations of match-fixing scandals
that have forced the guard to justify its involvement in the sport.

In a recent interview with sports magazine Tamashagaran Emrooz
(Today's Spectators), Guards commander Azizallah Mohammedi, a former board member
of the Football Federation of the Islamic Republic of Iran (FFIRI) argued that
the military group’s involvement in soccer had grown from the fact that some of
its members had played soccer in the past. He said they had become soccer
managers not as part of a Guards strategy but because of the qualifications and
skills they brought to the table.

Mohammed Dadkan, who served as FFIRI president from 2002 to
2006, however dismissed Mr. Mohammedi’s portrayal in an interview in August. “Managers in the world of football world are
corrupt. Unfortunately, people who know nothing about football are involved in
this sport - managers from the Guards and the Law Enforcement Forces," Mr.
Dadkan said.

IGRC commanders have served at various times as head of
Persepolis FC, one of Iran and Asia’s top clubs while Lotfollah Forouzandeh
Dehkordi, a guard commander and former vice-president under Rouhani’s hard-line
predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a member of its board.

Fajr Sepasi FC, a club in Shiraz owned by The Organization
for Mobilization of the Oppressed or Basij, a voluntary militia associated with
the guards, is directed by Colonel Zohrab Qanbari Mahardou.

Brigadier-General Gholam-Asgar Karimian is chairman of Tractor
Sazi FC, a top flight club in Tabriz, the capital of East Azerbaijan, whose
supporters have protested in recent years against the government’s
environmental policy and at times raised Azeri nationalist slogans. The club’s
president is former Guard Saeed Abbassi while another commander, Mostafa
Ajorlou, the guards’ former head of physical training, is a member of its
board.

Traktor Sazi is owned for 70 percent by the city’s
state-owned tractor company, which in turn is owned by Mehr-e Eqtesad-e Iranian
Investment Company that was sanctioned by the US Treasury as a subsidiary of
Mehr Bank, an IGRC financial institution. The remain 30 percent by the Defence
Ministry’s by Kosar Financial Institution.

Mr. Ajorlou, wh en he headed Steel Azin FC before joining
the Traktor Sazi board, tried to sack top Iranian player Ali Karimi for
allegedly not fasting during Ramadan and questioning the commander’s decisions.

Azar news, a news agency operated by the National Resistance
Organization of Azerbaijan (NROA), a coalition of opposition forces dominated
by the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, a group that was tainted when it moved its
operations in 1986 to Iraq at a time that Iraq was at war with Iran, this month
leaked a letter allegedly written by
General Karimian detailing how Traktor Sazi could be used to unite Azeris
against what the general termed “racist and separatist groups.”

The letter said the groups were campaigning for a “study the
mother tongue day.” It suggested that the mother tongue referred to was Talysh,
a dying northwest Iranian language that is still spoken by at most a million
people in the Iranian provinces of Gilan and Ardabil and the southern Azerbaijan.

The letter implied that the groups General Karimian was
concerned about were Azeris separatists, Islamists and Turkish Alevis, a sect
viewed as heretical by orthodox Islam that accounts for up to 20 percent of
Turkey’s populations.

“Wherever Tractor goes, fans of the opposing club chant
insulting slogans. They imitate the sound of donkeys, because Azerbaijanis are
historically derided as stupid and stubborn. I remember incidents going back to
the time that I was a teenager,” said a long-standing observer of Iranian
soccer.

As a result, stadia in which Traktor Sazi Tabriz FC play are
repeatedly the venue for protests demanding greater rights for Iran’s Azeri
minority. During one clash in 2013 in Teheran’s Azadi stadium with the
capital’s storied Persepolis FC, Traktor Sazi supporters unfurled a banner
saying in English: “South Azerbaijan isn’t Iran,” a reference to East
Azerbaijan that borders on Azerbaijan.

James M.
Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies,
co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, a
syndicated columnist, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog and a forthcoming book with
the same title.

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About Me

James M DorseyWelcome to The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer by James M. Dorsey, a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Soccer in the Middle East and North Africa is played as much on as off the pitch. Stadiums are a symbol of the battle for political freedom; economic opportunity; ethnic, religious and national identity; and gender rights. Alongside the mosque, the stadium was until the Arab revolt erupted in late 2010 the only alternative public space for venting pent-up anger and frustration. It was the training ground in countries like Egypt and Tunisia where militant fans prepared for a day in which their organization and street battle experience would serve them in the showdown with autocratic rulers. Soccer has its own unique thrill – a high-stakes game of cat and mouse between militants and security forces and a struggle for a trophy grander than the FIFA World Cup: the future of a region. This blog explores the role of soccer at a time of transition from autocratic rule to a more open society. It also features James’s daily political comment on the region’s developments. Contact: incoherentblog@gmail.comView my complete profile